How can we not teach it?
Holocaust education engages students in critical thinking and self-reflection, by which they can make essential connections between history and the contemporary moral choices they confront in their own lives. Education is the process of discovery. Students who are immersed in a highly advanced age of technology discover that pure rationality and scientific approaches to problems can produce destructive as well as beneficial consequences. During the Holocaust religious, moral, and legal systems failed in deterring the dangers of prejudice, apathy, and indifference. These same dangers are present today, with television programs such as Race and Reason and the promotion of nationalism by different governments.
By studying the Holocaust, students learn to challenge preconceptions and understand the complex relationship between individual identity and universal identity.
Holocaust education provides a pathway for students to confront their present concerns involving loyalty, peer pressure, scapegoating, conformity and belonging. By studying the past to understand the present, they learn that human beings possess the power to control their behavior, so they become aware of the importance of making choices and come to realize that one person can make a difference. Abolishing the civil rights of one group can lead to the abolition of those rights for all, so each person must take a stand against evil or eventually risk forfeiting all individual freedom.